


Alive or just barely breathing

by glorygore



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Psychological Trauma, Short, Violence, pre everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23174998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorygore/pseuds/glorygore
Summary: There are walls around him and they are moving, choking him out, choking him in. How are there walls and why is he here?
Kudos: 8





	Alive or just barely breathing

**Author's Note:**

> So this is... something. Confusing and... confusing. It's set before Joker "becomes" the Joker.
> 
> Title is inspired by the song Just Barely Breathing by Killswitch Engage

He stares at a wall appearing out of nowhere in front of him, a wall that is impossibly high. He feels confounded, looming his fingertips over the smooth concrete. There shouldn’t be a wall here, he thinks, not of this size or sensation. There wasn’t one here when he entered the building, and shouldn’t be when he’s just now about to leave.

But there it is. Standing tall before him. 

It fills his body with a fit of uncontrollable giggle. Looking around, he mentally notes all the other walls that have popped up silently out of thin air. Some were moving too, changing places or moving up and down. To elude him? 

He doesn’t feel particularly eluded, just suddenly filled with so much laughter that his body aches. He slides down to the ground, back pressed against the first wall, heels dug into the ground.

He had no way of knowing how long he sat there, aching and cramping with laughter – so much so that tears had begun roll down his face – but it had begun to darken around him. How it could get darker when he was in a place with bodies of walls while it was already dark as night, he did not know. At that moment, he didn’t know anything, and he begun to rock back and forth where he sat: still laughing. Everything hurt. All muscle, every fiber, millions upon millions of cells had reached the point of pain. And all he knew how to do was laugh.

Then he hears a noise behind him, behind the wall. He can’t reach in to listen, but he hears it still; the soft sound of a man talking. 

“Are you well?” _Am I well? Am I well? What is well? I’m a well! Toss a coin in me. Shove a coin in me. Use a coin in me. I’m made out of coins. Take me. Use me. I’m made to be used. To be tossed around. To be tossed into a well._

He laughs. And he laughs. And then he roars, so loud and so much that he tastes blood. It’s blood everywhere; on the ground, on his hands, on the walls; everything is stained with it. The smell of copper fills up his nostrils and makes brain feel fuzzy and thick. 

He listens to hear if the man was still there or if he had left. There was nothing coming out of the walls, not even a breeze of a whisper. He sighs, and it’s deep: reaching to the depths of his lungs and out his nostrils, he sighs for what feels like an hour. Just air, just clean air. Clean, clear air. It makes him smile. _Finally, finally, finally, finally_ , but somewhere in there he knows that it’s a decoy. A lie, just like all the other lies, the filth, the madness, the stench shaped like an elephant on the walls lingering in the room. The rain, how he had longed for the rain, to be soaked in it, to disappear in it, to never be found again in it. 

He suddenly feels a strange pull towards a lonesome hall to his left, and he watches down it. It wants for him, begs for him, _come come come come_. Come back. 

A morbid sound of what couldn’t be anything else but laughter slips out through his teeth, and it felt like he had been punched in the stomach. He’s cold and he’s freezing, a sensation he hadn’t felt or cared to feel for years, and it was creeping into every atom in his body. It hit him and kept hitting him, punching him to a pulp. 

“Can you here me?” He perks up slightly of the soft sound of the man again, and it’s making his bones quiver with a sensation he can’t describe nor recognize. Suddenly it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. He wants to respond, but his tongue is stuck in the back of his throat and he can’t breathe. _I can hear you but I can’t see you. Can’t feel you. Can I feel at all? Am I here at all? Am I at all? Am I tall? Tall as a tree. Tall as a mountain. Big, strong, heavy. Tall as_ -

No. No. 

No. 

“Blink if you can hear me.” 

He blinks and he blinks and keeps blinking, for short, for long, he blinks so much his eyelids aches. No. This is all wrong. There are walls around him and they are moving, choking him out, choking him in. How are there walls and why is he here. He blinks fast, sees a shape. A gruesome looking figure staggers to him, tall as a tree and a mountain combined, strong and big. He’s a child again, and he can’t move. Is he a child, or is he just so small he can see every particle in the air and when he breathes they don’t move but stay intact in close contact? 

The shape is close now, and he can feel it’s warmth radiating through his skin, can hear it breathing through damaged lunch, can smell everything he never wanted. 

It’s reaching out a what he thinks is a hand, _closer closer closer closer_ , and it’s just about to touch him, stain him, corrupt him, when he bolts and runs. He runs, and he runs, to the left, through the hall that was calling to him earlier. He’s there, he sees it, he feels it, he runs and he runs and he runs and-

Light. His eyes are fully open and there is light, there are people walking in and out, and sounds and smells and a bed. He’s sitting on the bed with a needle stuck in his arm, a monitor beside him. Feverishly he looks around, looking for the shape, for the voice, for any black wall that wants to consume him. No one talks to him, they just work on bandages around his fingers and hands and he stares at them with eyes so wide they itch. Everything is bad.

“Where…” He tries to get the words out but they get stuck. Everything is wrong. 

“You’re at Arkham Asylum, do you remember what happened?” the one nurse that is left when the others are finished with sculpting his hands into the beginning of a mummy says and she smiles at him but it’s fake, it’s all fake, everything is a lie and the room is screeching with laughter at him. No. He doesn’t need to remember what happened, he needs to leave. He wasn’t done. He didn’t finish what had started.

“I need to go back”, he manages through what felt like knives in his throat. 

“Back where? Out? It’s mayhem out there, you’re better off in here”, the nurse laughs, but it’s not as fake or mean as it should be, could be: it’s bittersweet. 

“Back inside”, he roars. “Back inside. Take me back!” 

“You need to calm down or I’ll call security.”

He storms off the bed and crashes into her, his hands clasping around her throat and thumbs digging into the soft flesh in between the beginnings of the collarbones. She tries to scream but he screams louder, seeing red: the roof, the ground, the window, the nurse, everything is red. He dunks her head against the floor several times, all while still choking her. Frustratingly clawing at her face, but with the bandages it leaves no mark, so he – while sitting on her torso: clasping his legs around her to hold her still while she attempts to flee in a haze of pain and survival instinct – tears them off and starts digging into her skin of her face with his broken fingernails. She screams again, wiggling and fighting him, getting a few punches on him that he doesn’t feel through the adrenaline rush pumping through his body, filling him with a frightening amount of ecstasy. 

Her blood is on his fingers, her sobs mingling with his sharp breaths. He sees, he sees everything. But he’s incomplete. 

He chokes her until she stops breathing and then he gets off of her body. 

It’s oddly quiet now that the damned screaming had stopped. He looks around, looks out the window. It’s silent. No bird, no car, no human. Just the buzzing noise of a flickering light above him. 

There’s a weird ticking inside his skull, nagging at his brain. Like a timer, a time bomb, but so small and insignificant that he decides to ignore it. 

Instead, he walks to the door and opens it. He’s met with a hallway and he suddenly understands. All humor he ever knew leaves his body and is replaced by agony. The two walls that frame the infinitely long hallway before him are black and moving closer together by the second. He has a choice to make, and he has to make it fast. Looking behind him, he sees the room and the dead nurse with the only difference being the window that has somehow opened and is waiting for him to turn around and jump out of it. But before him is the hallway, harrowingly stretched out into an unknown abyss and it’s narrowing and narrowing and narrowing.

He runs into it, and hopes and hopes and hopes that he will make it to the end, wherever or whatever the end is, he just knows it’s where he needs to be. 

The walls are on him, licking his skin, choking him in choking him in choking him _choking choking choking I’m dying I’m dying I’m dying_

_Finally._

**Author's Note:**

> All the possible grammar mistakes in this chapters are all mine, so if you stumble upon any please let me know so that I can bring them back to safety.


End file.
